Photoshop FITS Liberator version 2 - create spectacular pictures in minutes

This image shows the User Interface for the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator version 2. With this software, released today, it is now easier and faster than ever before to create colour images from raw observations from for instance the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, ESA's XMM-Newton and the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope.

The numbers indicate:

1. The preview window
2. Histogram
3. Tools
4. Statistics
5. Advanced tools for scaling and stretch

The simple workflow is to open a FITS image, study it in the Preview window, adjust the black- and white levels (6) to give a reasonable contrast, and then set the input range for the scaling of the image by clicking Auto Scaling Button (7). Now different values of the Scaled Peak level can be tested to scale the image more or less to better fit with one of the possible Stretch functions (8).

Many astronomical images have very high dynamic range, or many greyscales. This means that the brightest areas of interest may be many thousands (even millions) of times brighter than the faintest structures in the image. On a computer screen, however, one only can see 256 levels of brightness one is forced to either lose the faint structures to black, or to oversaturate (or burn in) the brightest objects.

For this reason, the FITS Liberator has an advanced "Scaling and Stretch" section that provides many options for compressing this dynamic range using mathematical functions such as a logarithm as the data are imported.